A transmission type display device, such as a liquid crystal display device or a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) display device, includes a display panel and a backlight disposed on the back of the display panel and employs so-called PWM dimming as a method for adjusting the luminance (brightness) of the display panel. PWM dimming involves adjusting the current supplied to the backlight, for example, by changing the pulse width (duty ratio) of a pulse signal.
Blinking backlight control, which allows for an improvement in the visibility of moving images on a display panel on the principle of PWM dimming, has been used in recent years. Blinking backlight control involves blinking a backlight in synchronization with a vertical synchronization signal when the field of a video signal on the display panel ends and preventing the display of images in the backlight extinction period to reduce overlaps between images (see Patent Literature 1).